Software “upgrades” — And the hits keep coming!

I put a blog post here on Tuesday, complaining about a couple of software “upgrades” that actually broke stuff. It keeps getting worse! To wit:

The latest version of iTunes (10.7.0.21) has broken my music library. For no apparent reason, iTunes has decided that hundreds of my music files “cannot be located.” I tried following the instructions that someone helpfully put in a YouTube video, but it didn’t fix the problem, and it actually made the problem worse — now my iTunes folder was all at sixes and sevens, with a bunch of new duplicate XML config files appearing and a bunch of music folders disappearing.

So I uninstalled iTunes, completely deleted my entire music folder, reinstalled iTunes, factory-reset my iPod, then restored all my music files from backup and re-synced everything back into my iPod. This took over three hours, as I have about 42 GB of music on my computer.

And the end result? I’m right back where I started. Hundreds of music files “cannot be located.”

The problem? There are major bugs in iTunes 10.7.0.21 for 64-bit Windows 7. That’s right, the latest version of iTunes broke my music library. All I can do is hope that the next release will fix the problem.

This, on top of the iOS 6 upgrade on iPad, which famously replaced Google Maps with Apple’s own sloppy, broken Maps app, and took away YouTube (replacing it with… NOTHING — iPad users are reduced to using the crappy mobile version of the YouTube website), is making me wonder if Apple’s salad days are over.

So, this week’s electronic wrecking crews:

The Bitly Chrome extension: they f*ed this one up so bad that I uninstalled it, and now I just compose all my tweets in the TweetDeck desktop application.

The latest iPad Twitter app, which made Lists harder to navigate to and made the embedded Web browser full-screen (if you’re going to do that, why not just have Web pages open in Mobile Safari, guys?).

The latest iTunes, which badly broke my music library on Windows 7.

iOS 6, which took away two great apps and replaced them with one broken app and one big bag of Screw You.